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The Honor of Mothers

On Mother’s Day, of course we are going to honor our mothers. And, of course, we don’t each of us individually just honor our own mother, we honor all mothers.

What does that mean? What do we mean when we say “we are honoring mothers”? Is it like Hispanic Heritage month, where we honor things Hispanic? Is it like Columbus Day, when we honor the man who “discovered” our land? Or “Businessman of the Year? In those cases, saying we “honor them” means that we take note of the distinct good that this person (or this people) rendered to us or the distinct good they stand for, and we give due thanks and due recognition of the effort and spirit of the person(s) who did it.

Yes, we certainly do this too when we honor mothers today. But I think that we mean more than that for mothers. There is another, more specific sense of honor that we should think about as well. The generic sense is “giving due recognition” for someone’s good work, good will, and goodness of spirit. The specific sense is more like “giving due recognition for full self-sacrifice”. This is the honor applicable to soldiers and police and firemen, most especially: they put their own bodies, even their very LIVES on the line for the good of the rest of us. So, when we think of “honors” in this sense, and we have military awards and medals to make known these honors, we acknowledge that honor is connected to these professions, and the people who fulfill them, in a special way.

When a person willingly goes out into battle to protect his family and his people, he is rendering a signal service to them, a service that (at least potentially) is all-encompassing: it may require giving everything he has. Even as it is the duty of some to commit to this service, (because man is a social animal whose personal good is integrated with the social good), it is the duty of the rest of us to be properly grateful for this service, in some cases merely difficult and in other cases supremely difficult. And it isn’t just the risk of death (or disability) that is difficult, it is also the physically trying efforts and conditions – putting up with screaming sergeants during training, sleep interrupted at any and all hours, being in battle conditions long past when there should have been a reprieve, accepting wretched food because that’s what’s available en masse, limitations on their liberty to decide their own comings and goings, and so on. And our due respect, our due gratitude, comes in these acts whereby we GIVE honor to them because not only their acts but their very lives ARE those of honor. Thus, “honor” is a two-sided reality, it subsists in individual acts of goodness and giving that are difficult, and especially in a person whose life’s service is of difficult good acts rendered well and willingly; and then it evokes our response, respect made manifest by our returning back to the person public acclaim of the goodness and service, with the thanks and respect of the people made better by that service.

It should be obvious, then, how even this special sense of honor applies also to mothers – though not in quite the same way it applies to soldiers and police. A mother, for the first 9 months of a child’s life, puts her whole body at the service of the child. (It’s not just the uterus: the hips splay out, the skin deals with the stretch marks, the back takes on enormous stress, the breasts prepare for food delivery, the hormones change many other things, the appetite changes, the moods change, etc. It is not a mother’s womb that bears the child, it is the whole person who bears the child.) For some 6000 years at least, this service was, also, very dangerous to mothers: loss of life or loss of health was almost as common to mothers as to soldiers. They took on the risks to themselves for the good of others.

The sacrificing doesn’t stop at birth, of course. Nursing a child and other caring for his needs demands enormous attention, and considerable physical effort as well: sleep interrupted at any and all hours, putting up with squalling and screaming even as you are trying to locate and fix the problem, slogging through your 20th hour without reprieve of changing sheets because the kid with a flu barfed yet again, grabbing wretched meals because that’s all the time or energy you have available, limitations on your liberty, your freedom to choose to go to the store, the cinema, the play, just out with friends. And it doesn’t stop during childhood: mothers experience in their hearts the pain that their grown-up children must suffer in adult life, for being a mother doesn’t stop when the child-rearing does. (“A sword shall pierce your heart,” Luke 2:35)

Which leads me to the example par excellence of mothers, Mary. As a dutiful and grace-filled Jewish young woman, she must have been well aware of the “suffering servant” of the scriptural passages about the Messiah. She knew his life would not be all peaches and cream. She probably knew how Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son Isaac was a foreshadowing of the Messiah’s role also. The angel’s bidding to her presented both an absolutely unprecedented honor to a human, and an almost unprecedented promise of future heart-rending sorrow, a piercing role confirmed by Simeon. In addition to offering her self to God for bearing the Son, she willingly took on the prospect of that future suffering. And at the wedding feast at Cana when the wine was out, she kicked off Jesus’s public miracle-working ministry, though she knew where it would end. And she stuck to that, to the bitter end, standing at the foot of the Cross, humbly offering to the Father her only child. When we honor mothers today, we honor also Mary for her obedient life-long sacrifice to God.

Notice also that being a mother isn’t just a profession, it is a vocation. It is a calling – particularly, a vocation to lay down your life for someone you don’t even know (yet). It is just a slow form of laying down your life, bit by bit. And so, if we say that soldiering is a profession of special honor, then so also is the vocation of mother. Not in exactly the same way as soldiers, certainly: mothers don’t have enemies trying to kill them, for example.

So what’s the problem? The problem is a social failure of imagination: our culture is losing the sense of motherhood as a calling of honor. In movies, on TV, and in books, you can hardly move without tripping over something that casts a woman in one of the OTHER fields of special honor, but who is not a mother: women police, women agents, women fire-fighters, women tomb raiders(?), women martial artists extraordinaire, women superhero fighters, and on and on. And then, when a significant character is a mother, her motherhood is downplayed, the character is always a mother AND: engineer, coach, doctor, etc. There is a hardly a show or movie in the last 20 years where a lead character’s main purpose in life and in the story was as a mother. I read a science fiction book some half-dozen years ago where an important character takes the question on point blank. Raised in an “oppressive” traditional culture, the young woman feels that because the risky, fighting professions are forbidden to women, so also is the opportunity for honor closed to women: If they are not worthy of being entrusted to do their share of the fighting, they are not granted full equality of rights, self-sufficiency, and honor. (To which my preferred answer came from a women I know: why in the world would women want to sink to mere equality with men?) There is almost no depicting of motherhood itself as a deep and noble calling.

Why this failure of social imagination? I was tempted to say that it stems from the sexual revolution, but I think it actually came in with mothers working outside the home, which started earlier. Perhaps the sexual revolution (and it’s contraceptive progeny) hurried the change along. But somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, women (and society as a whole) were sold a false story: that to get their just deserts they needed to be in the workforce the same way men were, in the same roles and in the same conditions. With a poverty-stricken social narrative, feminists could only see one thread of equality: that of sameness. They refused to see a whole fabric with threads woven in the warp and weft of society, refused to see a multiplicity of roles for of being excellent, successful humans, of being honored, being “empowered”, being able. The only form they accepted for fulfillment was job fulfillment. The only form of honor is that of the honored male professions. The only form of social power was that in the hands of men – captains of industry, politicians, etc., so that form needed to be extended to women. Feminists proclaim this picture as empowering women, but it is only empowering to women who want to act like men in the world. For a woman who wants to succeed well in the traditional niche of mother, she is now even less able to fulfill such a role than was true before, so the “expansion” of women’s so-called equality is really a shifting of rights from one set of rights to another, one set of opportunities opened while another set are closed off.

How far has this trend in media affected people? I know of young women who can’t even imagine being stay at home mothers. I know of a few young women leaving college who are torn because they know that socially, they are expected to enter the ordinary workforce and acquire a career, and economically there is little choice but to do that, while at the same time they recognize that doing so means that there are womanly / motherly arts that they will hardly have the opportunity to develop fully…not to mention that they can rarely find a young man who expects to provide for his wife and family so she can stay at home with the children.

What’s to be done? Some, but not enough. One easy one is to make sure your children have a wealth of books and stories from 70 years ago and older. Everything from the Bobbsey Twins (not very good writing, of course) to Narnia, and the Little House books. Another avenue is to explore work-at-home entrepreneurship, so that the economic demands can be met while not being “out in the world”. But I don’t see any of these actually turning the culture around, not even close. At most they help create a tiny stich in the fabric, enough to allow a woman to at least try (if she wants that) to be a mother first.

Thanks to my Mom (now deceased) and to my wife, and to all mothers who are fulfilling their role as the bearer of children, the heart of the home and the one who forms characters.

Comments (20)

I think part of the "narrative change" is also related to the idea that if a woman is a full-time mother and if motherhood is a vocation, then by necessity a woman who is a mother is going to be dependent on her husband, and that kind of dependency is in many quarters absolutely, positively condemned. Partly due to concerns of what happens if the husband is rotten, but I suspect the reality is that any kind of female dependency on men is horrifying to many in the modern culture.

Add in the fact that dependence on the government is never seen as a problem and hey, it looks like you have a lot of ingredients for cultural disaster in place.

if a woman is a full-time mother and if motherhood is a vocation, then by necessity a woman who is a mother is going to be dependent on her husband, and that kind of dependency is in many quarters absolutely, positively condemned.

Crude, very true. Dependency is viewed with abhorrence. Of course, this attitude cannot stand the reality that man is of necessity dependent on others: on his parents of course, but also on society for many things. No man can make a just order on his own. No man can be a doctor and teacher and engineer, movie director, cobbler, farmer, etc - man does not live by his own capacity alone, at least not well, not the life of a man fully expressed. Further, no man or woman can "have a child" on his or her own, it requires another person. (Even with IVF, there is the need for a male's input, and even if we eventually get true cloning, there will be the need for doctors and engineers.) It is true all over the natural order that "if you would be successful at X", you require the help of other men and women: if a man would be a father, he must have a wife. If a person would be an engineer, he must have teachers. If a man would be a great quarterback, he needs great receivers. And that's in the natural plane. Man is also dependent on God's sustaining him every moment, giving him the ongoing capacity to will and to do. So, the attitude you point to is one of outrage at humility, as well as being just unreasonable humanly speaking.

Many people don't seem to mind dependency so long as it's on the government. Or, if not the government, then at least a suitably large, abstract organization or class of people, preferably one that answers to them or whatever group they imagine themselves as being a part of, ideally. The one thing that seems to play havoc with people's comfort with that kind of dependency is a duty. I recall that there was fury in Florida over drug-testing being involved with some kind of social welfare, such that if you were caught doing drugs, your money was at risk. Hell was raised, and so on.

That, I suspect, is important here. It's important to recognize and even embrace a certain kind of dependency, but the right kind of dependency. Something has gone wrong when a mother is dependent first and foremost not on a husband, not on a family, not on a neighbor, not on a neighborhood, not on a town, not even on a city or state, but on the federal government. And that dependency in turn means there are duties that should be met at the lowest levels possible, and which aren't being met, or are actively discouraged from being met.

Great post, Tony, thanks much! I definitely agree that the prospects for turning the whole culture around are fairly dim. But as usual I advocate doing what we can with our own children. Teach the boys to intend to support a family so that their wives can stay at home with the children. At least to make that a priority, to see that as the ideal towards which to strive. Teach the girls to intend to be at-home moms--again, to make that the ideal and the intention and to plan accordingly with a prospective husband.

I hate to put it this way, but one problem is that it seems increasingly even Christian young men do not see it as a matter of proper pride to be able to support a family or a matter of embarrassment if they never can, get married, and expect their wives to support them and/or live on the edge of poverty. Instead, they plan impractically for their own futures and do not feel abashed when saying, "Yeah, I don't really expect to be able to support a family" while seeking a "dream job" that never comes. One always hopes that falling in love will cure this kind of impracticality, but one sometimes worries that it won't, because egalitarianism is so widely accepted on both sides. Perhaps only falling in love with a girl who said, openly, "I'd really like to marry you, but I also want to be an at-home mom, and how are we going to work that, since right now you are only seeking jobs that barely allow you to live in a house you share with three other guys?" But at what stage in a real-life relationship would such a statement even make sense? Before or after falling in love and getting engaged? At some point, hopefully a much earlier point, it does seem that it has to come back to older adults whom the young people, including the young men, respect, to tell them to make that responsibility a priority.

Of course I don't at all downplay the real economic issues, but these are greatly exacerbated when the need for a couple to plan for the husband to be the breadwinner while the mom stays home, to aim for that, is not even acknowledged.

>ith a poverty-stricken social narrative, feminists could only see one thread of equality: that of sameness. They refused to see a whole fabric with threads woven in the warp and weft of society, refused to see a multiplicity of roles for of being excellent, successful humans, of being honored, being “empowered”, being able. The only form they accepted for fulfillment was job fulfillment. The only form of honor is that of the honored male professions. The only form of social power was that in the hands of men – captains of industry, politicians, etc., so that form needed to be extended to women. Feminists proclaim this picture as empowering women, but it is only empowering to women who want to act like men in the world. For a woman who wants to succeed well in the traditional niche of mother, she is now even less able to fulfill such a role than was true before, so the “expansion” of women’s so-called equality is really a shifting of rights from one set of rights to another, one set of opportunities opened while another set are closed off.

It is important to understand the context of the cultural changes that have occurred over the past 50 years. Traditional motherhood has not collapsed because of feminism, it has collapsed because of capitalism and the way that the power of the almighty dollar has changed American social attitudes. America is now a truly "Capitalist" society in every sense of the term, and those with money and rewarding jobs are given honor and prestige because they are wealthy. It is not because they are brave or perform dangerous work, and it certainly isn't because they provide society with a useful service. Most parents don't dream of their son becoming a firefighter, they dream of him becoming a doctor, and if they are sophisticated perhaps an investment banker. Why? Money, of course. Money is what drives America, and everyone knows it even if they will not admit it. In such an environment it is impossible for the cultural value traditionally placed on motherhood to remain relevant because it is fundamentally at odds with the materialist and capitalist ethos that now dominates American culture.

This is one of the reasons I have always found the alliance between religious conservatives and free market libertarians so bizarre. America is the only country in which this alliance exists, and it makes no sense because free markets and the materialism they create destroy traditional ways of living and even traditional ways of thinking about the nature of reality. It's easy to say that feminism is to blame and that if we could get rid of it motherhood would be valued again, but that is just not so. It is the worst kind of wishful thinking. Being a housewife doesn't get you the money to buy a new ipad, nor does it have the prestige of a well paying profession. To get society to value it again would require you to eliminate the consumer mindset that now exists, and that mindset isn't really related to feminism at all. This is a capitalist "problem", not a feminist one. It is interesting to read sites like Front Porch Republic and The American Conservative because many of their writers understand this, they know that libertarianism and weaker forms of economic conservatism are incompatible with any sort of real traditionalism. I'm not sure what the future of the cultural conservative movement looks like in America, but if it continues to blame the ghost of feminism and the sexual revolution for the ills it seeks to correct it is doomed to failure.

Dunsany, I don't know how old you are, but I can tell you for a fact that a lot of employers were quite willing to be so-called "sexist" until forced to pretend that gender didn't matter. And they didn't do that out of values conservatism but because they found that it worked economically. It was not capitalism (except by some extremely warped definition unworthy to be addressed) that gave us the family leave act--signed by a Republican President with _explicit_ mention of the intent to get more women into the workforce. It was not capitalism that gave us laws against a "hostile work environment." For that matter, it wasn't capitalism that gave us gender anti-discrimination laws in the first place. It wasn't capitalism that interpreted such laws so that interviewing employers can be sued if they hold it against a female applicant that she is heavily pregnant and will probably bug out and take her 3-month leave when they have barely got her trained, during which time they must hold her job open for her. It was not capitalism that made it illegal to ask a female candidate about how she deals with issues such as childcare and the ways in which this might pull against the demands of work, and to make subsequent hiring decisions accordingly. It was not capitalism that sent employers scurrying to force everyone to undergo sensitivity training lest they be sued under laws intended to get more women into the workforce. Those examples will do for the nonce. The active, politically motivated forcing of employers to pretend that gender does not matter, when apparently (whaddaya know!) employers weren't just acknowledging this spontaneously as a matter of capitalism, is a matter of such recent, living historical memory that it is ludicrous to try to deny it. Yet your comment implies that the "equalizing" and then feminizing of the workforce has happened as by the Invisible Hand and the power of the profit motive. It just ain't true.

Why did women demand to work in the first place? You can say it was feminism, but I simply do not see any reason to think that is true. It played a part perhaps, but the truth is that women wanted money and still do. Even if you were to repeal all anti-discrimination laws women would still want to work and make money. You cannot escape that no matter how much you wish you could. I find it odd that you think the laws you mention are responsible for changing whether or not women want to work-do you really believe that? It seems implausible to me. Maybe you are implying women couldn't get jobs if such laws did not exist, and that also seems deeply implausible. I'm just not sure what your point is. Women want to work and make money. Did the government cause them feel that way? Did feminism?

>et your comment implies that the "equalizing" and then feminizing of the workforce has happened as by the Invisible Hand and the power of the profit motive. It just ain't true.

Most cultural shifts are multifaceted, and this is no exception. My claim is not that feminism played no role in, it is that capitalism and the consumer society is what drives modern America. Modern Americans value money and material possessions, period. Unless you have a way to make being a housewife as lucrative as a regular job women will not want to be housewives, feminism or no feminism.

Most cultural shifts are multifaceted, and this is no exception. My claim is not that feminism played no role in, it is that capitalism and the consumer society is what drives modern America. Modern Americans value money and material possessions, period.

Well, unlike the usual, Dunsany, you are not completely wrong here. :-)

It is true that unrestrained desire for material prosperity is playing a heavy hand in today's culture. NOW it is. But it didn't get that way in the late 1950's and 1960's alone. It couldn't have broken down the cultural barriers and the cultural markers in favor of the dignity of motherhood all by itself. So other factors HAD to play their part. Feminism, and other isms of various sorts (general liberalism really) were critical to the materialistic threads of prosperity taking the upper hand over distinct cultural values for women distinctly from values for men. There is no getting around it: the narrative of the worthy and loved stay-at-home mom was attacked ideologically before it became widespread for mothers to be working outside the home. That narrative was attacked indirectly by liberals of all stripes, but ESPECIALLY and explicitly by feminists, in the middle of the century, while it was both very much the norm for mothers to stay home, AND it was very much the expectation of women to be able to do so for the good of the family. To change that expectation, mere material prosperity had to have something else to shove a wedge in the door, for the 1950's and 1960's were a period of unprecedented optimism about continuing advancement in prosperity without the necessity of mothers going into the workforce.

Now, with women in the workforce, employers have had a glut of labor for decades, and they have gotten used to paying a lot less (comparatively) for menial to moderate skilled jobs than they otherwise would have. That's not going to be easy to turn around. Did the glut of labor come before or after economic necessity (of sorts) pushed women into seeking to add their income to the family to make ends meet? I don't know all the details, but since it certainly happened over an extended time it is certainly possible that neither one "came before the other" in any simple sense. But in SOME sense, women in the 1950's didn't think prosperity demanded it, and women in the 90's pretty much did, and in between was a whole generation of young women many of whom were the first in their family who planned on working outside the home even when married. Somehow that expectation had to become present to them even when it didn't to their mothers (and older family members).

Waaay too broad a question. Different women want to work for different reasons. Many for reasons for feminism or reasons related thereto, such as "I don't want to be dependent on a husband" or "Being at home with children is boring" or "Don't call me a housewife" or what-not. All of that came from an ideological shift. Others for reasons of real financial need, in which case there is a sense in which they _don't_ want to work outside the home and are torn. Some just to "get money" in the shallow sense you are implying. As you say, a complex phenomenon. Though some of your comments, Dunsany, undermine your admission of that complexity.

Even if you were to repeal all anti-discrimination laws women would still want to work and make money. You cannot escape that no matter how much you wish you could.

Again, some because they really need the money, which needn't be a matter of capitalism nor of greed. It could be related to inflationary monetary policy, for example!

Maybe you are implying women couldn't get jobs if such laws did not exist, and that also seems deeply implausible.

There was a time when they certainly couldn't get many jobs, or found it much harder, for the reasons implied in my above comment. Now many employers just are feminists themselves and/or have bought the silly line that feminism in business practices is profitable or something of that kind.

And, yes, of course there was a chicken-and-egg feedback loop between laws forcing employers not to take gender into account and societal expectations that women should or must work, driving more women to seek work. Why would there not be? The societal movement was all of a piece--both the prospective employees and the prospective employers were taught propagandistically there there was not and should not be the difference presumed by traditional gender roles.

Modern Americans value money and material possessions, period. Unless you have a way to make being a housewife as lucrative as a regular job women will not want to be housewives, feminism or no feminism.

Again, waaaay too strong a claim. I know lots who will and in fact many who actually _do_. And, as before, you elide the distinction between seriously monetary needs _driving_ unwilling women into the workforce (a real phenomenon) and mere shallow greed. You need to get out more, Dunsany.

Don't overlook the role of the Pill in all of this. This allowed for the delay in having babies that let women divorce marriage from procreation, work from motherhood.

"I'd really like to marry you, but I also want to be an at-home mom, and how are we going to work that, since right now you are only seeking jobs that barely allow you to live in a house you share with three other guys?"

It is tough to find true living wage jobs, today, even among the highly-skilled. One recent post-doc in molecular genetics, who got his B. S. from Columbia, his Ph.D from Harvard and did his post-doc at Princeton, could not find a job in academia. He is leading the charge in crowdsourcing scientific research. He can rent lab space at Berkely for $800/month and is working on orphan research projects which require small funding, but can be very helpful in treating certain non-glamorous diseases. He won't make much money, but he is performing valuable research. It is hard to reconcile what he has to do on a shoestring (can he, ever, afford to marry), with the idiotic six-figure salaries given to people whose only claim is that they make money. Society is, clearly, out of wack with regards to what it considers important.

One might claim that he could work for big pharma, if he wanted to make money, but are we, really, willing to throw up our hands and say that science is only for the wealth gentleman dilettante, as it was for most of the eighteenth-century? Different people have different gifts. One of the most talented clarinetist I know, with an academic doctorate in performance, has to work in a health food store, just to get benefits. What a waste. Even many physicists can't find work in academia, so they become Wall Street quants, who have created the evil computer trading we have, today.

Too much money is being given to too many people whose jobs are, simply put, not very important in the grand scheme of things and this, I claim, diminishes the uniqueness of man in his role as a rational creature capable of passing things on other than money to the next generation.

Feminism is obliquely responsible for this by flooding the market with cheap labor, but things could have evolved where, if the man worked at a particular job, the wife gots credit for it ( if not the pay), as well. Husband and wives could have been true collaborators, even if the wife stays home with the kids. Feminism wanted to fight the men, not work with them in doing the work of out-of-home employment.

The greed inherent in the modern economic markets, unfortunately, also play a large role in this mess. Jobs where people are afraid of losing something are over-valued (doctors play on the fear of death and bankers play on the fear of poverty ) and jobs where there is the promise of easy money are also over-valued. It all points to disordered appetites. It is hard to be a self-giving patent when one is driven by greed.

The economy certainly stinks right now, but I blame affirmative action in no small measure for the exaggerated force with which the poor economy falls upon men. And therefore, by extension, falls upon women who want to be at-home mothers. There are increasingly situations in which a dilemma for a woman is that she would find it easier to get a job than her husband. A conservative woman, especially, finds this a painful situation. Of course, Dunsany can say that they want to work "for money," but money is, after all, necessary to buy food and clothes and to pay the rent. It's not a dirty word. Of course the women want to work "for money," but it doesn't follow that there are no such women who would prefer to stay home and raise kids.

It is tough to find true living wage jobs, today, even among the highly-skilled.

Chicken, there is some truth to that, but it's not across the board true. The problem with the scope of the statement is, as you tacitly indicate, is that it depends rather heavily on what kind of work you want to do - or, who you are willing to "sell your soul out to" for a paycheck. There are a moderate number of jobs for highly skilled workers when they put their education into the avenues that are paying well. There is ALWAYS a limit to how many new people a given industry can take, so it is possible to glut that market, (as we did with lawyering in the 1980's) but that just means that smart people should not only be smart and get an education but also be smart and ask themselves which kinds of skills they need in order to get work that will pay a decent income and for which there is demand not being met. Being really smart but getting post-graduate degree in underwater basket weaving isn't to smart, is it? If the answer to "where is demand not being met" is sewage plant engineer, and you just don't feel like that kind of work, it is not that the job isn't there, it's that you refuse to take it. I know chemistry Ph.D.s who turned their noses up at "industrial chemical engineer" jobs because it was referred to as "glorified plumber" in the graduate school - but it's a perfectly decent job all the same.

At the same time, the number of somewhat skilled jobs has dropped dramatically, what with all of the manufacturing that went overseas. The loss of manufacturing itself, (even apart from the skilled jobs it implied), was a blow to the issue of men and women's jobs being differentiated, for more than one reason. It might be true that if we could get those jobs back, even if they are not the ideal jobs to support a family anymore, they might help the overall situation by opening up opportunities for men to to a man's job on a track to eventually do a family-man's job. I can't say that it's sure, but it is certain that the loss of these jobs contributed to the loss of differentiation and the eventual loss of the single-bread-winner as an expected social status.

By the way, this ties in with your comment, Chicken, about what the higher-paying jobs actually "produce." If everyone were to be thoughtful about how many degrees of remove their productivity (so called) lies from the actual real production of new wealth, it would be more obvious to people who are really drains on society. For example, a manager of front-line auto workers is at one remove: he doesn't put cars together, he helps make smoother the activity of people who actually make the cars. So too with the janitor. The doctor who treats the front-line worker is the same. The doctor's accountant who files the paperwork for insurance claims is at 2 removes. The insurance company adjuster who oversees the doctor's claims and denies some of them are at about 4 removes. The lawyer who sues other car makers for "borrowing" the auto-maker's patents without asking first is at about 4 or 5 levels of remove. The pension attorney who sues pension plans for failing to maintain their funds properly is at about 5 or 6 level away. MANY of the more removed areas of "work" are "productive" ONLY because of other people's greed, laziness, or other bad behavior: the tort attorney's main reason for living is to deal with people who got too greedy (insofar as he actually has a reason, that is). And most of these greater-removed jobs didn't even exist when the primary business of America was just plain making goods. It's like as we have been losing the work of making things, more and more effort goes into dividing and re-dividing and re-adjudicating the division of what remains. Such latter productivity is, essentially, a defective and crabbed kind of productivity, and people should be cognizant of that - not least, for social standing.

smart people should not only be smart and get an education but also be smart and ask themselves which kinds of skills they need in order to get work that will pay a decent income and for which there is demand not being met. Being really smart but getting post-graduate degree in underwater basket weaving isn't to smart, is it? If the answer to "where is demand not being met" is sewage plant engineer, and you just don't feel like that kind of work, it is not that the job isn't there, it's that you refuse to take it. I know chemistry Ph.D.s who turned their noses up at "industrial chemical engineer" jobs because it was referred to as "glorified plumber" in the graduate school - but it's a perfectly decent job all the same.

There is a difference between a job and a vocation. As I pointed out with the clarinetist, his vocation is to music. He has special skills in it that God gave him and he refined, but he is working as a salesman in a health food store, hustering diet supplements of questionable value. He went where a demand wasn't being met, but there are better people for the job, since God has already shown him his best use of his skills. I could, easily, have been hired at a major university to teach music - I used to have a big name in the academic field, but I realized that there are other people who have that vocation - I do research and perform, which is a slightly different slant. I can also do science, and teaching there is more closely aligned with my calling.

Work, in itself, has a special dignity because we are all called to work by God, but what good does it do to give God one thing when he asks you for another?

First, let's remember that women have always contributed economically to the family. It wasn't until the 20th century with its industrial economy (outside employment for the men), nuclear family (no extended family to care for), public education (kids out of the house most of the day), and technological advances (home appliances, automobile, etc.), that women began to enjoy a considerable amount of leisure time which created new expectations. Many embraced the new role of housewife with its own standards of perfection, others plunged into volunteerism, and not a few were reduced to boredom and loneliness and thus motivated to take jobs outside the home.

But the bigger culprit in my view is divorce. So long as divorce is easy, women will want at least the possibility of economic "independence" in case the worst happens, which it often does. Indeed, men will prefer their married daughters to have a marketable skill and to be employable for the same reasons. Being employable these days usually means having an unbroken record of outside employment. Easy divorce, which was originally the project of men, makes widespread female outside employment inevitable.

In the comment above I failed to acknowledge MC's point in that The Pill was certainly a major contributor to the explosion of female leisure time in the 20th century, which also motivated women to work outside the home. So when you consider divorce, contraception, industrialism, changes in family structure, mass public education, and household technology together, you have a perfect storm.

Jeff, I was going to bring up home appliances and other labor saving options for Mom and mass public education through high school (almost through college if the kid will apply himself just a bit) as additional factors, but you got there first.

Tony, you covered a lot of ground in that essay - more than enough to chew on. There's another thing that could be mentioned as well: the Rosie-the-Riveter effect, whereby WW-II pushed many women into the workforce to support the war effort. http://www.dadi.org/rosie.htm

I think the idea that there are jobs of honour and jobs of less honour is a bit questionable. Every ones does the service he/she is able to provide for the society and that is in itself honourable. Considering motherhood a something normal just as teaching is or nursing or whatever gives more ground to call it a serious vocation, something you want to dedicated you life to. Setting it apart and letting it sound as something more honourable, makes it more look like something extra and in this perspective, the role of the man to be the provider is altered. Men working to provide for a family are in the same perspective sacrificing a lot and that is as honourable. Regarding motherhood as a more honourable thing to do than to be an engineer is similar to the view that being a mother and... is better than being a mother. Raising motherhood to the same level of a "normal" job is more in favour to make it as something valuable in itself rather than in the sacrifice it requires because then we can argue that all jobs require time and self sacrifice.I think we make the same mistake the media and the society make when they under evaluate motherhood and as when we over evaluate it. When we want to have a new perspective to a woman's vocation as a mother and we want people to believe in it, we must, I think, keep it in context of a family and lay it in the perspective of men and women together. We would benefit much more if we offer a way of life for both men and women than to just point out how badly the role of women have been lived and enthroning the role of mothers above all.
ps. I am not a native English speaker but I hope I phrased things clearly enough. If not please bear with me kindly. I am ready to to be taught. Thank you

I think that there _are_ jobs that deserve special praise for special reasons. For example, there is a special reason to praise firemen who risk their lives, as Tony says in the main post.

Within the family I am inclined to agree that the reasons for praising the breadwinner husband's job (where "job" here means his vocation as a husband and supporter of the family) and the mother's job tend to "balance out" in some sense.

It is a delicate matter, because it is important that we not succumb to a kind of boring egalitarianism--everything has to be equal, or we will make someone feel bad. There is _one sense_ in which the mother is placed on a special pedestal. But from a traditional perspective, this is only because in _another_ sense, the father is placed on a (different) special pedestal. The child should honor his mother with a set of feelings of honor somewhat different from those with which he honors his father.

C.S. Lewis has an excellent passage on the issue of what it means to say that things are of greater or lesser honor. It comes at the end of his space novel _Perelandra_ and is a kind of meditation on hierarchy and equality. The idea is, in a sense, that all things can be regarded as "the center" but only by being radically different and unequal. It's a fascinating passage.

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